Red Special (Day 469)

Catching up on my journals, making up time for the weekend here.

Continuing on my weekend guitar talks again. Last week I talked about the "Greeny", and this week I'll share what I learned about the "Red Special."

Check out Brian May talks about his guitar in the Premier Guitar interview here: https://youtu.be/IIVbUJnoduQ

As many musicians, Brian May--the co-founder and guitarist of Queen, was poor before his fame. He built the "Red Special" together with his dad. The design is very unique comparing to the mainstream guitars.

There are three pickups on the Red where can be switched on or off independently. Another unique feature is that there are 3 switches where you can flip the phase of each pickup. Brian May explained how he uses the different combinations and the sound they produce in the video interview above.

Unlike many other famous guitars that are made by manufacturers and made famous by guitarists, Red is custom made by Brian May, there aren't re-issues or replicas available from the big guitar brands.

The British guitar shop Burns started to reproduce the "BM Signature" models in 2001 (actually manufactured in Korea) and won the "Best Guitar of 2001" by Guitarist magazine. But they are no longer in production.

Later Brian May created his own Brian May Guitars that employs third party manufacturers to reproduce a few different models of the Red, amongst them, BMG Special and BMG Super are replicas of the Red. But the waiting list for these guitars are closed since 2019 and there's no news on when will they be available again. These replicas was originally produced in Korea, I heard (unconfirmed rumor) that it's manufactured from the same shops that produces the PRS SE series, but now switched to a guitar shop in Czech Republic.

There is a hand-crafted replica by KZ Guitar Works in Japan, and costs 1 million Japanese Yen (> US$10k), but they are no longer in production, too. These are very sort-after models for collectors.

There's a detailed list of official and unofficial replicas from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Special#Replicas

Two interesting side notes:

• If you want to reproduce the sound of Brian May, you'll need the "Treble Booster" pedal, too

• Brian May received his phD degree in Astrophysics from Imperial College London in 2007--36 years after he started the program in 1971.

Image credit: https://youtu.be/IIVbUJnoduQ